The cardamom shortbread cookies should have been a dead giveaway. Growing up, every Christmas without fail, Georgia’s mother fished out the secret handwritten recipe and filled row after row of holiday-themed tins and Tupperware to dazzle the neighbors. On occasion, Georgia and her brother joined the assembly. On occasion, they threw salmonella precautions to the wind and snuck bites of leftover dough; first shaving heaping spoonfuls with wild abandon, then frugally scraping concentric circles around and around the bowl. On occasion, they waited out both the kitchen timer and their dough bellyaches sitting on the cool tile floor beneath the warm glow of the oven light, one of her favorite traditions she shared with her otherwise taciturn and unreadable brother.
This morning, as she peeled the saran wrap off the housewarming gift of the gnome-like old man she found waiting outside her gen-z-millenial-cusp apartment, the same cardamom scent disarmed Georgia. She could almost feel her mother’s tacky dough gumming up the palms of her hands. The thud of the tin on the counter startled her into the present moment.
“They taste better warm.” The gnome man evidently let himself in and was now helping himself to the microwave, piling cookies onto one of her carcinogenic 99-cent Target plastic plates.
“Make yourself right at home,” Georgia balked. He continued, maddeningly unphased.
“Pffft…Microwave safe…sure. Haven’t seen plates like these in a long time. You really shouldn’t put things like this remotely near your body…but I guess it’s what you’ve got.”
The old man signaled that their conversation was over with a grunt, and became occupied with watching the glass tray spin. Georgia’s patience wore thin. Before he knocked on her door, she was in the middle of a decorating frenzy, and was determined to get back to it. Just above the microwave, she envisioned the crowning glory of her kitchenette, a TJ Maxx framed inspirational quote: ‘What if I fall? Oh but darling, what if you fly?’. She imagined herself starting off each day on the right foot, gazing at the quote while sipping tea from her new Rae Dunn mug that said ‘mug.’
The irascible old man stopped his puttering and abruptly opened the fridge. Georgia’s breath caught in her chest, and her fingers covertly traced the seam of her jean pockets for a phone to call for help. But instead of taking anything, he just shuffled a few jars, looking at their labels; then closed the door, his eyes back to the spinning tray. Good thing too, since her phone was nowhere to be found.
As he stood in the glow of the microwave, her brain sputtered on. Don’t kid yourself, Georgia. You know this man. You know. But nothing came to mind. Defeated, she sank into her shitty beige couch. If she remembered correctly, it was a spoil of a long-ago Facebook Marketplace pillage, one of those trickster upholstered numbers that gave the impression of coziness, but lurking below the fabric was nothing but spiny wires and dust mites. A jagged spring carved into her back as she studied this strange man’s face, the curve of his eyebrow. The microwave hummed. The faint smell of cardamom permeated the room.
‘Odor Evoked Autobiographical Memory.’ The distant vocabulary words from a first-year psych class floated in front of her brain like one of those baby sensory videos. Unlike the other four senses, smell gets a TSA PreCheck to the brain’s memory processing bank due to the olfactory bulb’s proximity to the limbic system. Along with the amygdala and the hippocampus, the olfactory bulb choreographs a spectacular three-step memory waltz that will knock you off your feet into a childhood flashback tumble.
Georgia felt lucky to be overcome by a pleasant scent-based memory for once. Whenever anyone cracked open a specific brand of Bath & Body Works hand sanitizer, she gets unwillingly catapulted back to that time she peed herself at the second grade Scholastic Book Fair. Lydia Nguyen made a valiant attempt at diffusing one strong scent with another by sacrificing the entirety of her swanky keychain hand sanitizer to the puddle for the cause! …But it just smelled like Twisted Peppermint piss. To this day, when Georgia pees, she always feels a little festive.
The microwave beeped. The strange man wordlessly shuffled himself to the couch, snapping the head off a cardamom-bread-man as he sat. She surprised herself letting this gruff stranger sit so close to her, but maybe she was wrong. Maybe he just needed a friend. She stared at him, fascinated. He barely looked at her, save a few furtive glances. After the previous feeling of alarm, she was content to sit in silence.
The thought of dementia briefly fluttered across her mind. The disease had walloped every older person in her family. She considered herself ‘dementia-curious’ — why not reframe the inevitable? She thought about how cringe her generation’s memory regression would be. Instead of reverting to stories about playing with sticks, would she and her peers be doomed to mindlessly mutter ‘Free Shevacado’ at their bewildered kids? The thought amused and terrified her in equal measure.
She clocked that the old man had an innocuous habit of rolling his ankles between cookie crunches, a sort of mindless ritual to punctuate the beats of their nonconversation with his socks. Georgia, oblivious, also shared in this nervous habit. She would remain happily unaware for just over a decade until her irritable tween daughter Dakota diagnosed it as “the height of visual annoyance”, or whatever that means. And so, she would quietly acquiesce, and still her feet; part of an unfortunate pattern of folding herself smaller and smaller each day.
The rest of their silence ambled on without event (about two and a half more ankle rolls). Ignoring the twitch of the hairs on the back of her neck, Georgia wrapped up this unexpected visit with an efficient, “Well, I shouldn’t keep you from the rest of your day.”
She tried to stand up, but the message from her brain to her uncharacteristically swollen joints wouldn’t transmit. Without missing a beat, the old man helped her up.
As he crossed through the apartment door frame, the grumpy man smiled for the first time during his entire stay, looked her directly in the eye, and said, “It was nice to see you today, Georgia.” Her cheeks flushed red. His name. She never asked him his name. And she didn’t even try one of his cookies, god, what a shitty thing to do. She stumbled through an “It was lovely to meet you…uh…I’m sorry, what was it again?” The old man smiled a forgiving and patient smile: “Austin.”
And there it was: Austin. A simple trochee that felt like a punch. Austin. A name that was also a place. Her brother’s name. And standing in front of Georgia was Austin, all grown up.
She started to laugh. It was impossible until it wasn’t. But if that was her brother, where did that put Georgia? She felt woozy, and then her knees buckled.
From the floor, she watched as Austin tugged his earlobe and said to no one in particular, “Incident. Support to Wing 2024.” Within seconds, two men dressed in all-white medical-grade garments rushed into her room. She peed a little out of fright.
Christmas piss. Limbic waltz. Two strange angels, her city of a brother, and some cardamom cookies.
The two men lifted Georgia off the ground into a nearby chair. One man tugged his ear and muttered “Symptoms of Paradoxical Lucidity. Administering palliative treatment. Confirm DNR stats and power of attorney.” He pulled Austin aside, who had just about the saddest look on his face. The other man produced two large pills and a paper cup with tepid juice and instructed her to drink. Georgia, disoriented, complied. As she swallowed the pills, she caught a faint reflection of herself in the angel man’s glasses. Her hair, stark white. Her fingers, brittle and frail. Her eyes, surrounded by rows and rows of crow’s feet.