Chapter Twelve
LILLIAN
“So, what’s it like? An absence of smell?”
“When I try to visualize it, I see somebody walking off into a cloud of fog, and they suck the air with them as they walk, you know? Because they’re walking so quickly? In that empty wake, where the fog curls around but leaves a corridor, that is what I don’t smell. In a world full of smells, its absence is striking.”
“What, so if I pull a piece of paper through the air,” Isaac said, tearing a sheet from the hotel room’s notepad. “I pull this through the air, you would detect an absence of smell?”
“What?” Lillian said, shaking her head. “No. Paper has a smell.”
“No it doesn’t.”
“Yes it does! Heat it up, and you’ll smell it. You know, fresh paper from a copier?”
“That’s the ink that smells.”
“No, it’s the paper, too.
