Smell Like You Mean It

Our apartment stinks. It has stunk for weeks actually. Not so much our apartment but our building in general. The smell was strong, but honestly not offensive. It was sort of a medicinal smell, like someone was busy sterilizing a wound. My wife was convinced it was mothballs. Not terribly familiar with the smell of mothballs, I trusted her nose. It must be mothballs. But mothballs made no more sense than wound sterilization. Our apartments aren't fancy, but they're not crawl spaces. It was hard to imagine someone needing mothballs let alone enough of them to keep insects from devouring the entire building.

A couple of days ago a note was taped to our door. It read, "URGENT: There will be a meeting at 5:00 p.m. discussing the offensive smell in your building. We will meet in the hallway." After reading the note, I saw no sense in urgency. Why would anyone willingly meet with a bunch of people who can't wait to tell him he stinks. But the meeting was held and out of the six apartments in our building four tenants showed up. My wife and three of our neighbors met out in the hall and agreed the smell was an issue and discussed the next step. The plan was to notify the maintenance guy about the issue. His solution was to write another note and tape it on everybody's door. It read, "There is an offensive smell coming from one of the apartments in your building. It smells like mothballs. Please remove the source of the smell from the premises."

The note didn't work. The smell remained. I wasn't surprised I guess, in fact, I still wasn't convinced it was mothballs. The strength of the smell was too powerful. Someone would have to have a bathtub full of them to be able to permeate every other room in the building. It was a complete mystery to me. Luckily, one of our neighbors across the hall had a father that seemed to be a detective of some sort.

While my wife and I were leaving our apartment yesterday afternoon, we met them in the hallway. The woman had just had a baby and was terrified that whatever was causing the smell was poison and her baby was in danger. Her father was convinced it was a meth lab. "This is what it smells like when people cook meth," he told us. I wanted to ask him how the hell he could be so sure about a thing like that, but I could see the panic in their faces, and I knew it was no use trying to calm them down. Nothing is worse than two paranoid people reinforcing each other's craziest fears. So we left as quickly as we could. There was no telling what these two worry warts were capable of.

They decided to call the cops. I tried to imagine the old man's conversation with the officer on the phone.

"Hello, what is your emergency?"

"There's an odd smell in our hallway."

"I'm sorry?"

"A smell. It smells like mothballs."

"Sir, remain calm, we're on our way."

By the time we got back, we had missed all the action. It was indeed mothballs. Apparently the police officer and our building manager met our downstairs neighbor Earl, a fellow grad student. His apartment was covered in mothballs. He had them everywhere. Though strange to be sure, I still felt bad for the guy. Why he felt he needed his apartment littered with mothballs, I will never know. But to feel, however briefly, that you were a about to be arrested for stinking was probably unpleasant. I suppose this could have all been avoided if we took the time to meet one another around here. Now, all I know of Earl downstairs is that he's sort of crazy. And sadly it's likely to stay that way. Unless I need to store some blankets.