Too much Smelling Good? Feeling Good? (Trop de bonnes odeurs? Se sentir Bien?)

Prompt: Write about someone who makes a deal for viral fame-but their rising popularity comes with unexpected (or dangerous) side effects.

Too Much Smelling Good? Feeling Good? (Trop de bonnes odeurs? Se Sentir Bien?)

Most likely you have heard of great musicians or painters that have their hands insured for millions of dollars to protect their artistic genius and livelihood. How I wish it was the same for me in the fragrance industry I chose as my career. That type of insurance would catapult me to an amazing level of recognition. But for now, I must settle as a master perfumer who formulates new fragrances for the cosmetics and food industry without any fame or lucrative salary. I want the world to see me as a creative genius because of my olfactory talents. I have a “nose” that directs my artisan skills to create perfumes, lotions, colognes that bedazzle and awe others. Unfortunately, my creations are obscured by overzealous marketers who insist on hyperbolic video clips of Hollywood men and women. The videos focus on the models adorning themselves with the perfume in sensual and promiscuous poses while wearing sheer underwear.Never am I mentioned as the perfumist extraordinaire who formulated this fabulous concoction of essences and aromas. I create amazing toilet waters (Eau de Toilette) for the average consumer who long to smell terrific. Meanwhile, the top echelon executives collect millions of dollars and relegate me as a disposable commodity to be flushed away once I outlive my creative genius. Well I was in for a rude awakening.

Today was not unlike any other day. I sat at my bench hiding behind a multitude of bottles and apothecary-type containers full of the raw essences of flowers, bushes, animal scents and a large array of labware when I noticed an unopened envelope resting at an open spot on my bench. My heart was racing because I heard from the rumor mill that bonus checks were being sent out to some of the higher-level staff. I took a deep breath. Hesitantly I opened the envelope. My jaw seemingly dropped to the bench top. I was aghast at what I was reading.

It said, “Your services are no longer required. You have been designated for immediate discharge of your duties. Collect your personal effects and exit the premises immediately. Any delay on your part will result in forfeiture of pending salary remuneration along with cessation of short-term medical benefits. Thank you and have a nice day.”

I was in total shock. I had all I could to suppress an anguished cry. I looked around the lab but everyone was too busy to notice my reaction except for a vulture-looking security guard. He came over to my station with an empty box and in a not so discreet voice said, “Ok, playtime is over. Time to pack your bags and sail to points far away!” Now everyone stopped in their tracks to see the commotion. I could hear indistinguishable whispering. As the guard looked on, I grabbed my personal photos, clock, address book, and a few of the lab journals that were mine and my predecessor’s work before he suddenly left.

Right away the guard demanded me to remove the lab journals from my box. “That’s company property. It says so in the non-disclosure agreement you signed when you first started.”

I looked at him saying, “That was twenty years ago. Do you remember what you were doing back then? Maybe you were failing boy scouts,” I sarcastically replied.

He winced and responded with a hostile grimace that could break a mirror. He reached into the box extracting the journals minus a few papers that fell back into the box. The guard was indifferent to a few papers but not to humiliating me on the way out the door.

No sooner had I been rudely escorted out the door, the clouds opened up drenching me with liquid depression. I quickly became soaked head to toe. Fortunately, nothing in the box became wet. On my way to the parking lot, I encountered a shoddily dressed old man sitting at a bus stop adjacent to the parking lot. I decided to join him on the bench. He seemed a bit forlorn.

At this point I had all the time in the world so I engaged him in conversation. “I asked him, “Waiting for the number six bus to downtown? I have a car and I could take you there. I could use some company. I am Jacques by the way.”

Either he had intestinal gas or his smile was just ornery. He said, “Not today. I am still waiting until I can get in to get my stuff.”

Perplexed, I asked, “Get in where? Across the street to the Perfectors of Perfumery Building?”

The man replied, “Yup. Those thieves got my stuff and I want it back. For years I’ve waited on this bench for the right opportunity to sneak into the building.Every plan I made had some kind of flaw, maybe because I am spineless and a coward. So here I sit wallowing in self-pity.”

I plied him for more information. “What did you do there, if I might ask? And what is it that is so important or invaluable to you that would make you wait day after day for a right moment to enter?”

He said confidently, “I am the great Antoine, artisan of fragrances and aromas that captivate the heart, the mind, and the soul. About twenty-two years ago I had worked for that company.” He pointed at the building in disgust. “Never have I been so humiliated on that day they terminated me. I gave them decades of my life to fill their greed and pride. I was forcibly removed with no time to collect my personal formulations I had worked on during my own free time. Management claimed that everything I did including the air I breathed was owned by the company. If they could, they would have hooked me up to a vacuum to suck out the air before I left the building.”

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Antoine was my predecessor. I had worked on some of his own creations. “Antoine, I am your legacy. You were my mentor in absentia. I am so honored to meet you. I wish we could have collaborated to develop magnificent products. Management claimed you had died!”

Antoine became enraged. “Those scoundrels! How dare they! I must vindicate myself! Oh, but alas I just don’t know how.”

Antoine started to weep. I looked in my box for some tissues but finding none except the loose papers that had fallen from the journals.I scrutinized them but did not recognize the writing. They were formulations written by someone else. I read aloud one of the pages:

“Nanoparticle transference of the selected aroma. Use chemical permeation enhancers to send the target aroma deep into the skin. Send it below the skin surface….”

Antoine yelped, “What? Where did you get that? It is part of my idea for fragrance transmission! You must tell me how you got it! Please let me see your papers.”

I handed the papers to Antoine saying. “I had planned to take some of the older lab notebooks from my bench but a surly guard said they were company property. He forcibly took them out of the box causing some loose papers to fall right back in. He seemed not to care.”

Antoine replied, “Oh, my dear friend, these are my papers with my cherished formulations. You have saved an old wretch like me from utter despair! How could I ever thank you? Now I can continue my research and make prototypes. But where could I do this? I have no laboratory.”

I interjected. “Antoine, you can repay me by letting me help you continue to develop your product.” Humbly I implored him to share a reasonable stipend for my living allowance while we formulated. I added, “I have just the place where we can do our work. My brownstone has several rooms and is equipped with a fully stocked fragrance lab that is secret from anyone.”

Antoine perused his formula highlighting chemicals, mixing and distillation equipment he would need. It was somewhat bizarre even for me given my technical background. Dimethyl sulfoxide (DSMO), niosomes, solid-liquid nanoparticles (SLN), azone, pyrrolidones and more. I was worried that this would turn out to be more of a pharmaceutical than a fragrance, but he assured me that all of it would be on the up and up. He had discussed this with the legal department long before he got the proverbial boot from his job.

Antonie grinned and looked me in the eye saying, “Nothing like the present. Let’s do it. One thing I must insist on. The name of our creation will be ‘les ruses de l'âme maléfique’” (the Wiles of the Wicked Soul). Be prepared for anything and everything that will come our way.”

Today was the first of many days I joined with my mentor in a role as his faithful apprentice seeking to become wealthy, powerful, and famous. We quickly set to work perfecting his amazing transference formula. It only took a matter of a few days to complete it. Then it was simply adding the core fragrances like sweet raspberry chocolate, or marshmallow icy mint, or provocative lover’s embrace, or seductive musk manhood. The possibilities were endless. Working day and night Antonie and I mass produced a few thousand quarter ounce samples for distribution.

We both agreed that we would market our concoctions on my social media platform. I had to educate Antoine on what social media could do for our product image. I regretted that decision later down the road. I sent out postings offering free samples but requiring a meager shipping charge. (Shipping would have killed the project before it would have even started. Plus, it helped us to develop a database for future users).

In two weeks, my account was posting over ten thousand likes. The “likes” counter was acting like a stopwatch counting off the seconds. We had to scramble to get customer orders out the door in addition to our sample campaign which was hitting phenomenal numbers. We resolved we were going to keep pressing ahead without auxiliary resources. Our bank accounts were growing by epic proportions too. Repeat user numbers were astounding.

The sampling strategy kept up at a furious rate. Users were enthralled with the benefits. Not just smelling good, but feeling good as well! My site was now recording over two hundred thousand likes. Sample requests were coming in by the thousands. I mentioned to my partner that we need a backup plan once the sampling campaign ended. Antoine immediately offered up an idea which shook me to the core.He would show how the perfume altered his mental awareness and restored his physique (well, sort of-he was still very old). He made a video clip of him dancing in a see through shirt and underwear spraying the various perfumes all over his body. Without my advice he posted it on my media site. I initially gagged at the site of him dancing, let alone in pathetic underwear.I guess I really had to be prepared for anything. At this point I opted to take a backseat to the fame and settle for the fortune. I adamantly refused to use any of our products on myself frankly because Antoine was using them at a torrid rate. He ignored my request to label our products with “use sparingly.”

It was less than forty-eight hours when Antoine’s clip went viral. He was an incredible success! His success compelled us to hire a staff to manufacture the various SKU’s we had. Talk shows and podcasts were seeking him out to discuss his marvelous fragrance line, ‘les ruses de l'âme maléfique’. Antoine wanted me to join him, but I conceded the celebrity status to him despite the dreams of my youthful days. I wanted to remain a silent partner of sorts.

Antoine was a natural salesman. His obsessiveness to appear in public resulted in millions of our one-ounce bottles of the fragrances being sold. Despite even more expansion and our consolidation into an LLC, we could barely keep up with demand. Antoine started losing touch with the reality of our situation. He insisted he make more video clips to post on social media. He was using his perfumes on his body at an alarming rate. He ignored me when I pleaded with him to use them sparingly.

He would insanely shout out at me, “Jacques, I am king of perfumery! I am a god! My formula is a gift to humankind. They will worship us, Jacques! I can now do anything and everything I want! I think I will take a bath in my money, and rub my cologne all over my body, ha, ha.”

I feared for his sanity or rather the lack of it. He turned to me with wild, crazy eyes spewing, “Do what makes you happy! Do it until you fly away into oblivion!” I was scared he was suffering from dementia. He became a continuous shooting cannon of gibberish. He started drinking his fragrances as elixirs.

On our social page, which now I converted into Antoine’s proclaimed home page, users were touting how invigorated and revived they were feeling. Comments were pouring in from all over the world. Here are some of them:

“Your chocolate perfume made me feel like I was living in a chocolate factory.”

“On my vacation the musk spray invigorated me so intensely my sensual prowess lasted for days and days.I was so exhausted I had to take another vacation.”

“I saw marshmallows everywhere, dancing and singing in front of me.”

“The pineapple cologne made me book a flight to Tahiti to dance under the palm trees in a grass skirt.”

“The lover’s potion compelled me to stalk my boyfriend’s lover.”

And more and more comments flooded the site. It appeared that the postings were getting more and more sinister and some even macabre. Where was all this going, I thought to myself.

Six months after the successful launches, the media comments were less focused on the benefits and more on the deleterious effects of the perfumes, the colognes, and body sprays. Internet and television news headlines warned consumers about our perfumes being dangerous and toxic to the body. People were dying of coronary arrests. Users were driven to do dangerous things like skydiving, mountain climbing, highway drag racing. Unexplained fights broke out in grocery store lines. Hospitals reported more cases of early onset senility. Traffic deaths exponentially increased because of reckless driving.

Coroner reports from the deceased involved in those outrageous incidents measured high levels of transference chemicals like propylene glycol, azone, DMSO, ammonium salts and metal halides. The examiners general rulings for cause of death was poisoning. Recalls were issued, but it was too late. The carnage had been widespread. As quick as our social fame came into existence, it was swiftly followed by lawsuits, criminal charges, and closure of the business. Antoine was long gone. He was locked up as a prisoner in a federal sanitorium. Grabbing bundles of undeposited cash, I avoided the law before things got heated. I boarded a red-eye flight to a destination far from the simmering madness.

The dust of the disaster had settled after a year. Now deep in the jungles of Brazil in a makeshift lab I work on a new flavor creation made with natural ingredients. I think I will call it ‘fugitif des mauditis’ (fugitive of the accursed) in honor of my mentor, Antoine.

-END-

Do not be wise in your own eyes, fear the Lord and shun evil. (proverbs 3:7, NIV)

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21, NIV)

Human pride will be brought down, and human arrogance will be humbled. Only the Lord will be exalted on that day of judgment. (Isaiah 2:11, NLT)

As dead flies cause even a bottle of perfume to stink, so a little foolishness spoils great wisdom and honor. A wise person chooses the right road; a fool takes the wrong one. (Ecclesiastes 10:1-2, NLT)

Our lives are a Christ-like fragrance rising up to God. But this fragrance is perceived differently by those who are being saved and by those who are perishing. To those who are perishing, we are a dreadful smell of death and doom. But to those who are being saved, we are a life-giving perfume. (2 Corinthians 2:15-16 NLT)

NLT=New Living Translation Bible;

NIV=New International Version

Author:Pete Gautchier

Acknowledgement:Reedsy.com prompts