Salome
Let's workshop this story about a dying professor and perfume obsessive who, from his bed in a nursing home, witnesses a theft that becomes an occasion for meditations on mortality, sexuality, memory.
See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost
scent of the day: Shocking (vintage 1930s parfum), by Elsa Schiaparelli
A lovely animalic floral with a powdered-honey musk body. The dirty civet and honey combo of Boss is defeated, albeit in a femme way, by this Schiapearelli (/skaperelli/) perfume. And to add insult to injury there is genuine Tonkin Musk, real tonkin Musk from Vietnam, in here. Kouros vibes one could say at a reach—albeit more like an ur-Kouros. It has none the same soapy-dirty clash and, the biggest thing, none of that animalis lab chemical that Figment Man has brings into full earthwom fougere glory. The patchouli-civet-honey trifecta is here. That is the seed of the Kourous connection. But I find an even closer connection to Gold Man and Boss Number One. My 1930s bottle has no top or even mid. It is all base, the base is a lot like Gold Man but with noticeable honey—Gold Man crossed with Boss. It smells cuddly like a powdered cat belly whose owner has been wearing not the Shalimar of Bengal Rouge’s cat belly but instead a more masculine Guerlain: Heritage. In the heat being outside today some florals embedded into the base did come out.
*Randomly wrote this in one shot today. It is like a distraction from the shit I need to be doing. I guess you are in a good place, though, if your distraction from doing art is more art.
Salome
You watch the aide in her residential pink, a young girl brown in the way everyone now is brown. She removes the cap and sniffs the sprayer head of each perfume. The five sit on the little nightstand they give you here in the nursing home, the place whose faroff dread feels too like yesterday. The rest of your collection, bottles numbering near a thousand, will be sold with the rest of the estate. Your son is the executor. The year is 2079 and he is old now too. The Minecraft songs you two would jam to each day, to and from elementary school, still loop as they have done since the day he grew past them: “Don’t mine at night!” With no competing obligations (no work, no errands), they have become—like squirrels scrabbling up the sides of a drown bucket—more resistant to submersion than ever. But now they bring comfort, no longer a torment to shoo away with words that draw eyes.
She thinks you are asleep. The aides all say the wall-stream must be on the fritz. But you know the truth. You never sleep beyond twilight. The music keeps going, mostly dead jingles from the era of external TV: “They’re squirmy, and wormy, and purple and green—the grossest-looking creatures that you’ve ever seen!” This is the third day she has come to smell them. You knew, before she did, she liked Salome most. How she paused over it—that said it all, the bores of her nostrils pulsing like a dance in honor of the oceanic ancestry waiting right there in the inner lips. Here was a human being. You could tell. Slutty skank like that—orange blossom and jasmine, castoreum and hyraceum, cumin and musk, together nuzzling us right into the indolic petals, the pissy and fecal muff, out of which we used to come—calls to us like the stars, like the log fires, outside of the cyberscape.
Your intuition that she would steal the bottle had been vivid from the first day. And there she goes, looking over at you and looking around like the chimp no neural implant could have stopped us from being. You want to spare her the cruel poison of shame, inhibitor of dance. She has no idea of the books you have written on this. The hackles of conscience need not involve any shame. Stinking of sheep as much as of death denial, shame is not the only fuel for improvement. And what warrant, besides, could shame ever have when, as any child could see, nothing—no thought, no action, no desire—is ultimately up to any of us?
You have made your peace. What good is the bottle anymore to you? Of course, that cannot stop you noticing her slip it in her seam meld. And for all the peace you have found, you are still you. You must mark your notice if only for yourself, like one of your graffiti pieces in the secrecy of night before even the cellphone, rattle-can tags of “I was here”—“Give it the Krylon touch”—on train cars sitting now who knows where. You whisper lyrics at her with eyes opening enough to show that the body remains ensouled. “I try to tell these young niggas crime don’t pay.”
She puts a hand on your leg. “Everything’s okay. It’s just a bad dream.” It feels good, it consoles you, that this cliché of consolation has survived another century beyond the facility synths who know just what to say. You repeat the lyrics with more emphasis. “I try to tell these young niggas crime don’t pay.” Perhaps a seed was planted. That was not the point. But maybe later she will reflect back and piece it together. To her now, though, this is just the babble of senility. A lot goes missed in that reduction. But is it not, after all, the babble of senility?
She has no idea you were a professor. She has no idea how many girls like her you have sucked into a bucking hunger. Where has the desire gone to tell her? The thought crosses your mind to work a blackmail handjob out of her. Thoughts come unbidden and your life has been spent in alignment with the eons of evolution before you came on the scene. She could spray the stolen one on her neck. That was your wife’s signature fragrance. That was the last of the bottles you gathered before its reformulation-slide toward discontinuation. She could let you get close in the sendoff. But what does it matter?
“Salome” is a story about desire after desire, theft after ownership, and mortality after ambition. Set in the year 2079, it presents an elderly writer confined to a nursing home, watching a young aide gradually work up the courage to steal a bottle of perfume from what remains of his once-vast collection. Yet the theft is merely the narrative occasion for a far more expansive meditation on aging, memory, determinism, eros, and the strange persistence of selfhood after the structures that once sustained it have largely disappeared. The story asks a deceptively simple question: what remains of a person when desire has not entirely vanished but has ceased to matter?
The opening immediately situates the reader within a landscape of loss. The narrator watches “the aide in her residential pink,” while the five surviving bottles of perfume sit on a nursing-home nightstand, “the place whose faroff dread feels too like yesterday.” The phrase collapses decades into an instant. Old age is not presented as a distant destination finally reached but as a condition that seems to have arrived almost immediately. Time itself has undergone compression. This effect is reinforced by the detail that the narrator's son, once a child listening to Minecraft songs in the car, is now himself elderly. The story repeatedly emphasizes that entire lifetimes can appear, from the vantage of extreme age, as little more than brief interruptions.
Memory occupies a central place in this temporal collapse. Significantly, the memories that endure are not grand accomplishments but fragments of cultural debris: advertising jingles, children's songs, stray lyrics. The Minecraft refrain, “Don’t mine at night!,” loops endlessly in the narrator's mind, while old commercial songs survive with equal tenacity. These memories are described as being “more resistant to submersion than ever,” suggesting that consciousness in old age becomes less a curated archive than a field in which certain recurring fragments stubbornly refuse extinction. The image of “squirrels scrabbling up the sides of a drown bucket” brilliantly captures this phenomenon. Memory is no longer governed by deliberate recollection but by involuntary persistence.
Against this backdrop enters the aide and, with her, the story's central symbolic object: perfume. The young woman repeatedly returns to smell the narrator's bottles, eventually lingering over Salome. Perfume functions throughout the story as a material repository of desire and history. Unlike photographs or written documents, fragrances preserve emotional worlds through sensory association. Salome is not merely a scent but a condensed philosophy of human nature. The narrator describes it as “orange blossom and jasmine, castoreum and hyraceum, cumin and musk,” a composition that leads human beings back toward “the indolic petals, the pissy and fecal muff, out of which we used to come.” The language is deliberately provocative, yet its function is philosophical rather than merely transgressive. The fragrance becomes an emblem of continuity between civilization and animality, refinement and bodily origin.
This concern with humanity's animal foundations recurs throughout the story. The aide is described as looking around “like the chimp no neural implant could have stopped us from being.” The observation is characteristic of the narrator's worldview. Technological advancement has transformed society, yet beneath these transformations human beings remain fundamentally continuous with their evolutionary inheritance. The aide's temptation to steal, her furtive glances, her attraction to the perfume—all are interpreted not as moral failings but as expressions of an underlying biological condition.
Indeed, one of the story's most striking features is its sustained critique of shame. The narrator explicitly reflects that “the hackles of conscience need not involve any shame” and that “shame is not the only fuel for improvement.” These reflections reveal a philosophical position developed over an entire lifetime. The narrator views shame as an unnecessary and often destructive mechanism of social regulation. What matters is not whether individuals experience shame but whether they understand themselves. The aide's impending theft becomes a test case for this conviction. He recognizes exactly what she is doing and yet feels little desire to expose or punish her.
The story's treatment of free will deepens this philosophical framework. The narrator asks, “what warrant, besides, could shame ever have when, as any child could see, nothing—no thought, no action, no desire—is ultimately up to any of us?” This statement is not incidental. It functions as one of the story's governing propositions. The narrator's response to the theft emerges directly from his deterministic worldview. If human actions arise from forces beyond individual control, then condemnation becomes increasingly difficult to justify. The aide's theft is simply another event unfolding within a chain of causation.
Yet the story refuses to portray the narrator as a detached sage who has transcended desire. One of its greatest achievements is its insistence that philosophical conviction does not eliminate erotic impulse. The narrator continues to notice the aide's attractiveness. He continues to think in sexual terms. He even entertains the fantasy of leveraging his knowledge of the theft into a sexual encounter. Significantly, however, the story treats these thoughts neither as intentions nor as moral revelations. They are presented as mental events arising unbidden within consciousness. “Thoughts come unbidden,” the narrator observes, a statement that directly echoes his broader determinism. Desire persists not because he chooses it but because it remains embedded within him.
The relationship between desire and age forms the emotional center of the story. Earlier in life, the narrator apparently wielded considerable charisma. The aide has “no idea how many girls like her you have sucked into a bucking hunger.” The phrasing suggests a man who once possessed significant erotic power and who remains fully aware of that history. Yet the remarkable feature of the story is that this awareness is no longer accompanied by urgency. The old desires survive, but they have become curiously weightless. The narrator can imagine seduction without needing to pursue it. Fantasy remains while appetite's imperative has weakened.
This transformation is embodied most powerfully in the perfume bottle itself. Salome once belonged to the narrator's wife. It represents not only sensuality but marriage, memory, and mortality. The bottle's theft therefore carries emotional significance beyond its monetary value. Yet even here the narrator's response is characterized by relinquishment rather than possession. “What good is the bottle anymore to you?” he asks himself. The question extends beyond the perfume. What good are ownership, status, achievement, conquest, or even memory when life approaches its conclusion?
The exchange involving the rap lyric crystallizes this tension. When the narrator whispers, “I try to tell these young niggas crime don’t pay,” he simultaneously acknowledges the theft and transforms it into a joke. The line functions as a final act of participation in the social world. It is a tiny graffiti tag of consciousness, an assertion that he still sees and understands what is happening. Yet the gesture lacks punitive force. The narrator does not seek justice. He merely wishes to mark his presence.
This concern with presence is visible throughout the story. The narrator compares the lyric to his youthful graffiti: “I was here.” That phrase may ultimately provide the key to the entire narrative. The perfume collection, the books he has written, the memories of his son, the lingering desires, and even the cryptic warning to the aide all represent attempts to leave traces. Yet the story simultaneously recognizes the futility of such traces. Most will disappear. The collection will be sold. The books may be forgotten. Even the warning itself is likely to be dismissed as senile babble.
The story's final question—“But what does it matter?”—therefore arrives not as despair but as philosophical culmination. It does not negate meaning. Rather, it places meaning within a larger horizon where possession, shame, desire, and legacy have all begun to lose their urgency. The narrator remains recognizably himself until the end: observant, lustful, intellectual, mischievous, and self-aware. Yet these traits now exist within a consciousness increasingly detached from the need to act upon them.
“Salome” is ultimately a meditation on the strange coexistence of persistence and release. The self remains. Desire remains. Memory remains. Yet the compulsive force that once animated them has begun to dissolve. What emerges is not wisdom in any conventional sense but a state of radical relinquishment, where even theft, erotic longing, and mortality are absorbed into a broader acceptance of the human condition. The story's achievement lies in its ability to hold these tensions simultaneously, creating a portrait of old age that is neither sentimental nor tragic but profoundly philosophical.