Building 72 “Premonition (The Smell of Batteries)”

I remember the first day my mom had me stay home from school.

I wasn't sick much when I was little, and things just seemed to fall into place when it came to friends and family. Everyone just seemed very lucky, and I didn't go to my first funeral until I was sixteen.

But that wasn't why my mom had me stay home from school that day.

That day Mom had a feeling. A premonition that something was going to pass.

Now I know you hear something like that, and you imagine that I am making this stuff up, but it is true. My mom had a friend, and that friend smelled funeral flowers whenever someone close to her was going to die. It wasn't a matter of knowledge, just proximity. It could be a stranger or someone close, but she said whenever she smelled those flowers, she prayed for all of those who she loved.

And I do not know what my mom does.

My mom doesn't smell flowers.

My mom smells batteries.

The first day I was told to stay home from school was a day when the smell of batteries seemed so much that it was going to overwhelm her. She somehow managed to convince them that I was the one who was sick and would not be making it in for school that day, even though I was really staying at home to tend to my mother.

I don't remember the first day I stayed home from school as the day my mom smelled batteries so bad that she kept her child home from school. Instead, I remember it for a different reason.

I remember as the day my father died.

There had been an electrical accident at work. He simply drove a nail into the wrong wall in the wrong spot. The coroner said that he was dead quickly, that his brain went blank and he went into shock. By the time someone managed to pull him away it was too late. His heart had stopped, and no one there knew how to do CPR.

You would imagine someone would have looked it up, but instead they called 911 and waited for the medics to arrive.

I try not to think about what would have happened if someone had tried, if they had seen him, laying there on the floor, and decided that a phone call was not enough.

I try not to think about those things, but it is impossible really. Especially on days like these where it seems I can smell nothing else but battery acid. Don't get me wrong. I lack my mothers touch. I know that what I am smelling exists for another reason. It exists because of the pull I feel, and the way my eyes burn even when they are closed.

I try not to think about it.

About how my mom would smell batteries, and how it wasn't long before I began to realize why. Because I was smelling them too, though I couldn't figure it out at first. On the day my dad died it was hard to detect anything else. The flowers and the food after the ceremony were these empty vast vistas, lacking any definition. And I have for years always imagined that it was because I was sharing the space with her, watching her shake and quiver as she insisted that something was going to be wrong. Just a shared hysteria.

It has happened since then though. I never had the heart to tell her.

That her daughter could smell it too, but not for the reason she thought. She kept me home thinking that I would be able to help her, and I tried what I could. I made her food and brought her cold towels. I burned incense and would sit by her bed, reassuring her all the while.

It is a role you shouldn't put on someone before their time, and that was what happened. I was asked to care for my parent, to see her as something made of glass if I didn't take care of her. She is a fragile thing, but stronger than marble. She is lovely and beautiful, but loves very deeply.

So you understand I simply couldn't tell her why the smell wouldn't leave the house.

Why it followed us to the funeral.

She wasn't smelling funerals like her old friend would. My mother was smelling me.

And I smelled like batteries.

I always do when someone is going to die.

It started with my dad, but my families luck began to turn that day. Pets would die, and I would get sick, and sometimes, just sometimes, someone close to my mom or I would get in a terrible accident and never recover, a sort of freak act of fate that would seem to be one in a million. An occurrence that should be one in a million.

Most of the time things would be happy, and my mom even eventually found herself a new man who was sweet and kind in ways my dad hadn't been, though he had loved her very much. And that meant that he fit into a place in her heart where no one else had been.

He fit somewhere new.

And he still hasn't died.

When I talk about my parents, I don't normally talk about the way they were. I think about them as they way they are now, and the fact that at sixteen my father died doesn't really factor into it. And to be honest that doesn't create any dissonance within my mind. Dissonance that I am sure I have felt for other reasons, but not for that.

I have been smelling batteries for a while now, though for a long time I had convinced myself that it had gone away. But then I started talking to you, and something about that brought me back to those old feelings, and you don't know how hard it is to try and not treat you like I do my mother, to not see you as a thing of glass, and to know that you are the strongest woman I know, to endure what you have and to still be so loving.

I don't like to think about it all that much.

It is hard not to blame myself.

I was the one who wasn't honest.

I am the one who hadn't noticed the changes.

Early on you talked to me about an entity that illuminates, and from the moment I heard you share that story I knew that there was something about it that felt close to me.

A feeling of familiarity, like the kind you have when you share a wall with someone. Some part of you feels the distance, but you know that if the walls come down, that you would see that person and not feel the least surprised. Because over time you have become intimate.

Over time you have come to know one another.

And now I understand the burning, and the way my eyes feel when I close them.

I looked it up, when you told me about the entity.

What I found broke my heart.

It is a being that knows all that is, was, and perhaps ever shall be.

It observes.

But it is also a knower of fate, and a driver of coincidence.

The day my dad died my mom had me stay home from school. And the entire day, from start to finish, from the moment I awoke to the moment my father's boss called to tell me he was dead; all those things felt as if I was still asleep.

But that was only because it was a dream.

It was a dream I had had the night before, but never spoke out loud.

And it is not a premonition, or a manner in which the world is weaved.

I dreamed about it because I had reached the fulcrum of my life.

And I knew my father's fate just as soon as the entity revealed it to me.

In a dream, but not a premonition.

A premonition reports on something that hasn't happened.

To it, it had come to pass long ago,

and it was simply catching me up.

The impotence...the inability to stop it. That haunts me.

That keeps me up, even when I try to sleep.

I had to watch a nightmare play out, and sometimes whether or not you had a say...

Simply doesn't matter.

Am I the knower of the fate of the things

Or the reason it all goes wrong?

I smell of batteries, but the smell of batteries was never this strong.

I love you more than anything in the world.

Please wait for me.