Red

Trigger Warning: Violence, gore, and self-harm.

London, 1913

The first thing that I want you to know is that I am not mad. The unfortunate circumstances in which you find me might tend to suggest otherwise (then, too, I imagine that you hear protestations of rationality quite often), but I can assure you that my current situation is a matter of unhappy accident and not inherent lunacy.

I will admit to a temporary (and impermanent) loss of reason, but I believe that such an incident is hardly sufficient to establish a diagnosis of insanity.

I am, after all, a doctor.

I was not born colorblind. When I was a child, I could see colors just as well as you can, and I was (as well as I can recollect) an ordinary-enough sort of boy. At nine years old, I contracted scarlet fever and languished insensate for days. When I finally awoke, it was to a monochromatic world of black and white. My condition is rare, even amongst others considered colorblind; I understand that many see a sort of muted landscape of bilious greens and sallow yellows, to which I find my world of greyscale preferable.

Achromatopsia is the medical term for it, an uncommon but ultimately innocuous condition. It’s understood to be exclusively genetic, I know, but I believe that I may represent an as-yet-unexplored type of this genus; an index patient, if you will.

None might ever have believed my new mode of perception had it not caused my behavior to become singularly unusual. By some miracle (or rather, by some miraculous transmutation of the nervous system) my body had instantly adapted to accommodate my new deficiency. Though I could no longer see them, colors were still accessible to me via an entirely different mechanism: smell.

Amongst all senses, smell is uniquely connected to the limbic system of the brain, allowing certain odors to directly stimulate the amygdala and hippocampus. In layman’s terms, odors provoke emotions and memories far more strongly than our other senses, and for a time I was nearly paralyzed by the overpowering new world in which I’d found myself.

Fortuitous that I passed my childhood in the relatively dreary English countryside, with its desolate browns and slate-grey skies; had I been born on some tropical island I might have simply withered away, incapacitated by the encompassing beauty of my surroundings. My sole sojourn to America was made in the early autumn, and I can recall standing in the middle of Boston Commons for close to an hour under a glorious maple, inhaling deep lungfuls of Red. I expect that, to passersby, I must have looked quite mad (although I can assure you, I was not).

As it was, I spent an inordinate amount of time arrested by fields of heather or hardy collections of English roses. I craved color like an addict, fixating determinedly on the most vibrant scents that I could find in my gloomy surroundings. Imagine, if you will, being able to imbibe a puff of purest opium by merely catching your eye on some particular sight. Each novel scent was consistently intoxicating; the sight of a sunset was enough to render me ecstatic. I was a bloodhound for vivacity, turning my head frantically this way and that in pursuit of the most delectable odors. I once followed a ginger-haired man who smelled of the most fragrant citrus around the marketplace for hours, sniffing at him like a dog, until he’d finally had enough and chased me away.

I began to hoard scents like a dragon, the inherently transient nature of the brightest fruits and flowers necessitating constant replenishment. My father was professedly dismayed at the inordinate interest his only son showed in botany; my mother was bemused but agreeable, acquiescing to my strange requests for bright pieces of glass or floral arrangements instead of sporting equipment.

I was not, as you might imagine, a particularly popular boy.

The dawning self-awareness of how others might perceive me (generally concurrent with my coming of age) brought a sense of embarrassment and then horror. I had long-since accepted that I perceived the world around me far differently than did my peers, but gradually I also became aware of how I must in turn be perceived by them. Eccentricity, in those days, was only acceptable when employed by harmless older gentlemen. I, on the other hand, was constantly (and demonstratively) reacting to some mysterious stimuli perceptible only to myself. Inexplicable distraction could become a fixed, nearly voracious stare in an instant, and I twitched at random intervals, my head turning like an owl’s to capture my surroundings. My mother would later admit to me that many in our village had thought me addled or prone to strange fits. I had, by this point, made significant strides in curbing certain habitual behaviors, but her revelation conferred upon me a sort of self-conscious horror.

Small wonder, then, that I was determined to study medicine. London was, propitiously, even drearier then Devon, perpetually mired in a rank miasma of coal-smoke that seemed to leech the pigment from its surroundings. For a time, I was almost able to behave normally. Upon entering St. Bart’s, I immediately plunged myself into research, seeking to understand my condition and find the cure (or at least a curb) for my debilitating cravings.

First, I studied colorblindness itself; that, at least, seemed more or less understood by the medical community at large.

(As an aside, one point of interest: I learned that most animals do not see the world in black and white, as most erroneously assume. According to my research, greyscaled vision appears to be innate only to certain nocturnal predators).

Next, I came across the word synesthesia, and reading further felt a shock of scholastic triumph. For a brief hour I was euphoric, relieved that I was not an aberration after all but a recognized statistic; a known entity, albeit rare. Unfortunately, as I eventually read further, I realized that my celebration had been premature.

Synesthesia, you see, is a disorder of the brain, a confusion of the senses not limited to scent, where the visual may trigger the olfactory or the auditory, and vice versa. Some claim to see smells or feel words; one gentlemen wrote extensively about his experience hearing the sounds inherent to various types of cheeses (invariably described as pleasantly melodic, rendering his claimed experience somewhat dubious; one can hardly be expected to accept that cheese as malodorous as Camembert might sound flutish).

Colors, of course, factored into many synesthesia cases. I poured through pages of research concerning individuals who professed to “hear” or “smell” colors, eventually concluding that these poor souls were simply experiencing nervous disorders of some sort; mere coincidental infelicities of the senses, crossed wires in the brain causing random neurological associations. One subject, for example, noted that “bright pink” smelled of chemicals; another claimed that “purple” smelled of cigarette smoke. Ridiculous, of course, and not remotely accurate. Pink, as you may imagine, gives off a light and sugary scent, and Purple a richly floral note. How could something as primordial as color smell of something as modern as a cigarette?

What I experience is real, not subjective or a mere misconception of the brain. I’d genuinely developed a sense beyond normal human I am, as I have told you, not mad.

How can I prove this to you? Quite easily, in fact. I see only Black and White, and yet, I can consistently and accurately identify not only colors but their myriad hues and blends by smell alone. I can describe to you the exact shade of your clothes, your eyes, your shoes, your skin. I lack the vocabulary to describe my colors to you accurately, any more than you could explain blue to a man born blind.

I’ve found that the best way to explain what I experience is to compare respective odors to something my listener might be familiar with (although I must assure you that such a comparison is woefully inadequate to explain the overwhelming sensation that I myself experience). Pinks, as I’ve said, have a bright and tropical sugary scent. Light Greens smell sharp and alert, pleasantly cool without the foul aftertaste of menthol; darker Greens smell something like what you might consider pine, if pine was something one might find curiously delectable. Deep Blues are nearly indescribable: the scent of an abyssal midnight sea, if an ocean could smell of vanilla instead of brine.

I can only smell these colors when looking at them, of course, which sometimes causes a sort of abrupt displacement of the senses when I shut my eyes and the object’s true underlying scent, if present, is suddenly palpable, albeit comparatively faint. The brighter and more vibrant the color, the stronger and more layered its scent. The inverse is also true: that the duller or more unpleasant the color, the fainter or unpleasantly pungent the odor. A daffodil smells crisp and bright, but a jaundiced eye may only smell faintly of sulphur.

Colors found in nature always smell different than those that are artificial. Synthetic colors are always thin, and there is always a slightly medicinal tinge to the odor, a flat and almost chemical astringency belying the scent: the difference between strawberry-flavored candy and a ripe strawberry straight off of the vine.

And people—ah, you may have noticed that I have been somewhat reticent in describing my perception of people. I’ve told you of the great pains taken to appear normal to those around me, but I must believe that as a careful young student, my manner must have appeared disconcerting. Scent, you may know, greatly heightens human attraction; even just a whiff of a pleasant smell may enhance the mood (hence the proliferation of perfumery and cologne amongst the well-heeled set).

Although the pale English flesh which I was most accustomed to seeing at St. Bart’s in those days was hardly stimulating (a very mundane, nutty sort of beige), the passing sight of a nurse with a sugared blush to her cheeks and the rich scent of maple in her hair could bring me to an abrupt halt. Even my male peers were not exempt from my attentions; it was their smell, you see, that I found so intoxicating. Although I understood implicitly the ways in which I was expected to behave and could even more astutely discern which eligible ladies were considered both aesthetically pleasing and matrimonially suitable, these insights had no bearing on my appetites. I first developed an ill-fated fixation on a fellow student with the most exquisite golden hair; next, upon a patient case-study, a woman admitted for with syphilis, whose eyes smelled of the clearest and most invigorating mountain spring. Night after night, I pursued one poor wretch, a foul-mouthed dolly-mop with dirty fingernails and the loveliest port wine stain I’d ever seen, until she disappeared; I imagine that she’d had enough of me and fled to some other corner of London.

My behavior must have seemed erratic to them; cruel, even, for when these arresting features were obscured, my attraction seemed to vanish, and then I had only to catch a glimpse of whatever color had so fascinated me and my obsession would return ten-fold.

Hardly surprising, then, that I ensconced myself in dismal carrels and pallid hospitals and surrounded myself with colorless men in Black and White coats. I buried my gaze in rusty books with pages of stale bread as I desperately sought the answer to my affliction. I kept my head lowered during classes and studiously avoided the onlooker’s eye; I ate an aesthetes diet of grains and meats and bland root vegetables and took care not to cut through the park in springtime.

The one thing that I failed to account for was Red.

Red. How can I describe for you Red? Of all colors, Red in its many forms—persimmon and scarlet, rose and rouge and garnet—is the most delectable, intoxicating, irresistible scent, at once both appetizing and arousing. Sweet, at times, not in a sickly sort of way but evoking the choicest, juiciest berries bursting into one’s mouth on a hot day, sweet in a way that carries on the loveliest tropical breeze. Red is rich and succulent and lascivious; a single pomegranate was liable to enchant me for hours.

One does not pass through boyhood without scraping his knee or losing a tooth, and I was, of course, familiar with blood. By sight, near-black—by scent, enchanting. To you, the thought of blood may evoke something metallic or foul, but to me, just the sight of a few drops were mouth-watering.

I know that you imagine you know where this is leading, but your supposition is incorrect (if not illogical). I am no frenzied Renfield crouching in a corner, muttering after blood (although I must admit that our circumstances, at least as far as accommodations go, are not so dissimilar). Renfield, if you recall, was something of a vampire (or, at least, he aspired to be), and quite cruel, especially to animals. I have never so much as laid a stern hand to my dogs.

I have never wanted to hurt anyone.

My encounters with blood throughout the years were thankfully rare and mainly involving my own, but I recall an incident on the streets of London (a year or so before The Incident) wherein an impatient cab driver in my view happened to whip his old horse so cruelly that he accidentally opened a cut across its back.

Once I understood what I was looking at, I slammed my eyes shut as quickly as I could, but the damage had already been done. The shrill scream of the horse in pain echoed through my mind that night until I could not sleep. I was sickened by the sound, but neither could I forget the smell. It was obscene and predacious and unspeakably thrilling, that which I imagine drives sharks into a lustful feeding frenzy. Nauseated by my own reaction, I renewed my determination to understand and resolve my disorder—after all, if I were so afflicted, others must be, too. I could only imagine the animalistic state to which such a lesser man might be rendered—no, I knew that my work had to continue.

It may seem obvious to you that if the sight of blood could render me so instantly voracious then perhaps my profession was ill-chosen, but in my hubris I believed that I could somehow complete my apprenticeship without ever taking my turn at the surgical table. I had no ambitions towards surgery and kept my eyes cast carefully away during clinical demonstrations. At the time, I harbored an ambitious notion that I could become a sort of physician-scientist, perhaps reverting to a clinician once I had finally mastered my condition. To this end, I was extremely careful.

Really, in the end, what happened was a matter of bad luck as much as it was anything else.

I have told you before of my particular fascination with a certain ginger man’s hair. Most redheads’ hair, you must realize, is not truly red but auburn, or burnished copper, or rust-colored. Miss Cordelia Sharpe, nineteen, who came to the hospital suffering from suspected appendicitis, was possessed of the loveliest red hair I’d ever seen. It hung about her head in great vermillion clouds as she moaned in pain, clutching at her stomach, and I was helpless to look away, arrested by the heady fragrance.

I should have recused myself from the room, I know. I should have made any excuse. Instead, I stayed in the operating theater, watching alongside my peers as the doctor lifted his scalpel.

Despite the unfavorable conditions precedent, things still might have been alright, I believe, had the doctor not accidentally nicked Miss Sharpe’s artery. Accounts of what happened next are more invention than fact, the vulgar and fantastical fictions of those given to rude gossip.

True, I did rush down from the amphitheater, but the accusations of my subsequent behavior are quite false, I assure you. I will admit to experiencing a momentary lapse in reason, but I’m confident that an inquiry (if an honest attempt were ever undertaken) would reveal that Miss Sharpe’s failure to survive was due to the initial arterial cut and not any subsequent action of my own.

At any rate, I stopped myself (a thing that would have been impossible, were I truly mad), and upon regaining my senses, immediately attempted to rectify the situation.

As you can see, I only managed to sufficiently puncture my right eye before they wrested the scalpel away from me. I was convinced at the time that it was the right thing to do, but time and distance have softened my self-recrimination.

There! Even if you don’t believe me, I do appreciate that you’ve taken the time to listen—catharsis, after all, is healthy, and my fellows here are often exasperated with the more pedagogical aspects of my tale. At any rate, you’ve taken so many notes that I imagine I’ve been invaluable to your own research, whatever it may be.

As I’ve been so obliging, I’ll ask a favor in return. As I am, obviously, restrained, I am quite unable to do so myself—might you remove my blindfold?

I do so long to see again.