Smelly Virgins and Other Reasons to Panic

Tonight I finished reading Perfume. I had little choice - I read it riding home from work, and only a few chapters were left by the time we pulled in my driveway. With so few pages left, I couldn't save it for my Saturday flight to Albuquerque, lest I be stuck with nothing more to read before the pretzels are distributed.

I read Perfume expressly because it was Kurt Cobain's inspiration for track two of In Utero, "Scentless Apprentice". It's the dark tale of a bastard born in 18th-century Paris without any scent of his own - the man has no odor. Fantastically, he does possess a remarkable sense of smell, and uses his talents to become a perfumer's apprentice.

Like most babies smell like butter
His smell smelled like no other
He was born scentless and senseless
He was born a scentless apprentice

(See? It all makes sense now, doesn't it? And excellent drums on that track, no?)

The Scentless Apprentice becomes obsessed with bottling the scent of, as the back cover puts it, "a beautiful young virgin". To do so, he would have to kill her. He panics, not because he's adverse to killing virgins, but because he knows the bottle of Virgin Perfume would not last forever:

Grenouille was terrified. What happens, he thought, if the scent, once I possess it...what happens if it runs out? It's not the same as it is in your memory, where all scents are indestructible. The real thing gets used up in this world. It's transient. And by the time it has been used up, the source I took it from will no longer exist. And I will be as naked as before and will have to get along with surrogates, just like before. No, it will be even worse than before! For in the meantime I will have known it and possessed it, my own splendid scent, and I will not be able to forget it, because I never forget a scent. And for the rest of my life I will feed on it in my memory, just as I was feeding right now from the premonition of what I will possess...What do I need it for at all?

This was a most unpleasant thought for Grenouille. It frightened him beyond measure to think that once he did possess the scent that he did not yet possess, he must inevitably lose it. How long could he keep it? A few days? A few weeks? Perhaps a whole month, if he perfumed himself very sparingly with it? And then? He saw himself shaking the last drops from the bottle, rinsing the flacon with alcohol so that the last little bit would not be lost, and then he saw, smelled, how his beloved scent would vanish in the air, irrevocably, forever. It would be like a long slow death, a kind of suffocation in reverse, and agonizing gradual self-evaporation into the wretched world.

Aside from reminding me of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, that passage sums up a panic attack beautifully. My first experience with panic occurred in the "front" bathroom of the house I grew up in. My belt loop got hung up on one of the bathroom cabinet's handles. I was caught in such a manner that I couldn't free myself - my feet couldn't reach the ground, and I was left dangling by my jeans. In the few seconds of panic, I pictured my mother bringing future meals to me there in the bathroom, where I would hang for all of this earthly life. I thought to open my mouth and ask for help; a few seconds later, my brother or my mom freed me with minimal effort.

My first panic attack (which does not meet the clinical definition) occurred a few weeks ago. I was eating at an Indian restaurant when I suddenly couldn't eat any more nan. My heart raced, I could only breathe out of my mouth, and I could only walk with short, deliberate steps. A day or two later, the symptoms repeated as I tried to sleep and was in no way connected to a tandoor or biryani.