The Corpse Flower

Academic botany never held much interest for me. Oh, sure, I smoked the odd plant from time to time during academics, but I had never been drawn to the serious study of flora and fauna beyond a hobby. I was a medical student. My focus was studying what lurked in the deep recesses of the human body. The whence of strange pains and the what of disgusting growth. I wanted to know what made us tick and why, and what went on inside. Thanks to the city of Munich, I was learning. Having had a natural affinity for the work, I was now a graduate student writing my thesis on olfactory stimulation. Smell is the sense tied closest to memory. I had always wondered - why? Now in my final year at grad school, I had finally begun to understand. After locking myself in my room for weeks, I was finally approaching the first draft of my thesis. Finally, when a pounding roused me from my work.
Not everyone in grad school has what is required to cut it. Some of them have more focus on the less academic distractions of college life, and the fact that I was working on a thesis would not occur to them to be a deterrent from disturbing me. Mixers, dorm and house parties, all in the name of “blowing off steam.”
“Why would I want to blow off steam?” I put the question now to the red eyed slightly stoned female at my door. “Steam keeps me sharp. Without it I’d be like you.”
A titter. “Steve, you are so funny?”
Sometimes, honesty and humor get confused. I’m not actually nice, I’m actually pretty mean and everyone thinks I’m just being funny. Maybe one day I’ll enlighten them.
The girl was still talking. Why wouldn’t she shut up? God. “There’s this killer party in my room going on? You should totally come?” The valley girl inflection made my hair stand on end and made my diplomacy slip. She heard it in my voice and what I said made her turn as red as her eyes and leave without saying goodbye. It didn’t matter. By the time I closed the door behind her I was near to forgetting the altercation, and had never even bothered learning her name. I wasn’t here to make friends with this trash, I was cultivating my own life along with my plants and everyone else was wasting my time. I had my own plans, and none of them involved blowing off steam. Walking into my room was a bit like walking into a jungle, even without the steam.
It was alternately warm and humid, the blazing sun imitated by a row of heat lamps, or cool and dark, simulating night life, the purple moonlight of several black lights bathing the occupants in an easy-on-the-eyes glow. Tendrils from several morning glories grasped at the lamp, fingers trembling in the breeze from the fans. Further down, bamboo sprouted on healthy stalks from an enormous ceramic pot on the floor. Ferns peeked through the foliage, and a few nicely endowed marijuana plants could be spotted. A spruce tree sprouted from the corner, filling the immediate air with sweet spicy perfume. To someone familiar with rarities and felonies, the baby redwood peeking through the bamboo might have raised an eyebrow or two. But not three.
It was peaceful here. The air had a pleasant moist breeze to keep it cool, and unless I preferred music, the only sounds were those of trees growing, coupled with the quiet hum of the computer, the fans and a faint trickling when the irrigation system was on. Sometimes I liked to sit in the dark, in a clearing at the center of the greenery and hear the sounds of a jungle, piped in softy around me from my computer. Normally though, I prefer the quiet.
I turned on the black lights and slid the blackout curtains over my windows. Immediately, the room was bathed in an ethereal bluish glow. I sat down at my computer and the screensaver vanished. My dissertation on olfactory senses reappeared. So much was there, but it was so far from complete. There was still so much to do.
Hours later, the chiming of my phone’s alarm brought me back to reality. Dazed, I blinked my eyes and identified the source. I saved my work and stretched. The exhibit was open late tonight, and it had been around long enough that there wouldn’t be many people in attendance. I could take my time and have a comfortable drive and a leisurely dinner before viewing its magnificence. Maybe I would stop for a film, depending on how late I stayed and what was available. There was no hurry. I searched in my driving compact discs for a suitable mix.
In New Hampshire, a flower known as amorphophallus titanium had been cultivated, reaching over ten feet tall. While I wished someday to see that, another specimen less than a foot shorter had come to the Wilhelma garden in Stuttgart, which happened to be a few short hours from where I studied in Munich. If you’re not good at Latin, it is better known as the Corpse Flower.
So named for the resemblance of its bouquet to a rotting corpse, it seemed far too unique to pass up for a burgeoning amateur botanist to pass up. I didn’t have much hope for this, but some part of me was hoping the rest of me could get a single clipping.

As I entered Wilhelma gardens, I was beyond mellow. I had smoked a joint of my own creation on the way to the steakhouse and had a very satisfying dinner. A large flat iron steak with a mountain of mashed potatoes, smothered in rich delicious gravy and sautéed vegetables. I reflected that it was probably for the best the steakhouse wasn’t closer, or I would spend hundreds of dollars there a month.
As I approached the park, the smell of steak was replaced by air rich with oxygen and the sounds of water and whispering leaves as the breeze caressed them. . The air was moist, but not uncomfortable. Yet, still, there was an undercurrent of something vaguely not fitting for the pleasantness of the tableau before my eyes. Some horrible juxtaposition that shone through the peace and tranquility of the place. Yet somehow, oddly familiar. I tried to escape it and it continued to follow me even as I walked through the arboretum. It lingered as I stood staring at the lily pads. The sounds of civilization were fading as I penetrated deeper into the depths of the shrubbery. Then I turned a corner and my life changed forever.
This specifying of amorphophallus titanium was nine feet six inches from base to tip. The woman standing beside it barely reached halfway up its massive size. A large cup-shaped flower at the base resembled a pitcher while an enormous spire rose eight feet from the depths of the cup. The inside of the pitcher looked as though someone had burnt it, charring the inside black as some of it burned to a lustrous fiery orange. It looked like a giant mushroom, upside down.
But it was the smell, the smell which smacked me in the face and sent me reeling. Faintly out of the corner of my eye, I saw the woman beside it give me a scared look and sidle quickly away. I hardly noticed her though, nor when my face hit the dirt. By then, I was in my own world, a world I didn’t even know existed, and yet inhabited, created, controlled.
In this world, I was God.

He was a very curious monster. Long having been a devotee of Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs books, he had endeavored to recreate the unusual M.O.s listed in the book which were at the same time well known. The police were frustrated, not having an original MO to track; only his interests, which he shared with millions. The press had dubbed him the “Hollywood Killer” for he had branched out from simply parroting Harris’s creations to going to other forms of media for inspiration, and rearranging dismembered body parts in amusing ways, a nod to his favorite media and literature. So far, he had created a “tasteful” homage to Silence of the Lambs, one of the Saw movies, Hostel, True Blood, and Natural Born Killers. His passion for crime dramas, both movie and written, had resulted in a staggering sheaf of notes, dictating police investigations and what not to do.
This horrified the public most of all. The idea that any of them might be chosen so completely randomly and have horrible dramatized murder visited upon them for no reason other than they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was no trick to catch his eye.
This time, he was entertaining a dumb blonde girl who had taken too long with his KFC. It would have been different, had the bitch not taken ten minutes to flirt with some pock-marked chode, while holding onto his container of precious mashed potatoes. By the time she turned back to him, she was dead, and just as oblivious to that as she was to the chode stealing a handful of pennies from the tip jar as she turned her back. She gave him a banal smile, as devoid of true emotion as her wish that he have a nice day. Over her shoulder, he could see her would-be suitor making his way out the door, pockets jangling, another handful of pennies closer to his next fix, whatever that was.
Now, tied to his bed, he let her scream, cry and beg for mercy, relishing her petrified silences in which he could practically hear her brain working as he at his potatoes. She just knew she was going to get *****. Little did she know how repugnant the thought of placing any part of himself inside her was, at least while she was alive. As if anyone would want to. He couldn’t help but laugh.

“What’s wrong?”
“What happened?”
“Is he ok?”
“Are you ok?”
The words swarmed around me as I scrabbled back to consciousness. A circle of people looked down at me. Apparently I had passed out on the ground before the corpse flower.
The Corpse Flower.
I rolled over and retched, spewing steak, taters and gravy on the shoes of a well-to-do businessman who jumped back with an oath. Instantly the throng of people vanished from my space and a frightened sounding voice said “I’m calling 911!”
“Bleagh!” I said, and heaved, but my stomach was empty and nothing came up this time. “I mean, no, don’t. I’m fine.”
A finger paused over the call button. “Are you sure, sir?”
“Positive,” I said, nodding emphatically as I pushed myself to my feet on wobbly legs. “I just need…” I paused. What do I need? “…air,” I finished weakly, pushing my way to the outside. I laid ten feet of rubber on the parking lot, anxious to put as much distance as possible between myself and the Corpse Flower. At the nearest rest area I pulled over and stopped, staring out of the windshield, without seeing anything.
That had been me. Me, taking such pleasure in inflicting suffering on another. I knew it had been me because now I could remember the maddening wait for my KFC, and the sense of peace as I skinned the girl alive, and released her, once I had rendered her incapable of relating where she had been, or what had been done to her, outside of the obvious.
I had to know more. Mercifully there were no police on the way home; driving at 200km/hour would have been hard to adequately explain, but I made the return journey in a fraction of the time it had taken to get there. People raised their voices in greeting as I dashed by, forcefully preventing some from waylaying me. I finally made it into my room and slammed the door, bolted it and collapsed into my computer chair.
I knew from my research that the olfactory senses, the sinuses, were closely situated to my brain. 3% of the human genes were encoded to be olfactory receivers. The olfactory bulb was part of the brain’s limbic system, sometimes referred to as the “emotional brain.” Also associated with the olfactory bulb are the hippocampus, which is responsible for associative learning, which Pavlov exploited in his dog, bringing to our awareness the phrase Pavlov’s Dog. Additionally, the bulb is closely linked to the amygdala, which processes the emotion attached to the scent. The scent enters the body via the nose, and ties with the emotions of the moment as well as the memory. Thereafter, a whiff of the original scent triggers emotion, memory, and everything associated.
The Corpse Flower had awakened in me memories I had repressed, my mind desperate to forget them to the point of doing it for me, until the overpowering scent of death and rotting flesh irrevocably shoved it to the forefront of my mind. I was shocked, disturbed, and repulsed. One of my friends had experiences with bizarre happenings coming to light with the advent of diphenhydramine and diazepam. This was unwise, though, and had frequently resulted in nothing but utter falsehoods and outright hallucination. That was not what I needed. I desperately needed the facts.
The next day or two passed in a haze of tedious alertness. I was desperate to remember more and slept every chance I could, hoping I would be able to fill in the gaps with my dreams, as unreliable as that would be, but my sleep was mostly sporadic, with few dreams, none of which applied to anything even remotely relevant. After a week, I had had enough. With shaking hands, I unlocked the door to my car and began the long drive back to Stuttgart. I could feel my pulse rising as the miles dropped away between the flower and myself, unsure of what I would see this time, if anything. I was pretty sure though, that my drive would not be in vain. From the joy and level of expertise I had exhibited in my last flashback, it seemed likely that it was not my first time, and did not seem likely to be my last.
This time, I made sure no one was around to see me, and held my breath until within a few feet of the flower, and stat down on a bench usefully positioned a few feet from the flower. I exhaled, and inhaled deeply through my nose, filling my lungs with the stench of rot and death.

The first time was not nearly so neat, and not so rehearsed. Far more random and disturbing. The boy had been working a street corner all night, dropping his prices dramatically and had seen very little action from anybody. Normally, scum could be counted upon to overlook his obvious age and physical appearance, sometimes simply requiring him to wear a bag over his head or declare loudly that he was in fact over 18. He was happy to oblige them; it paid the bills. Fortunately there were not many of them, but the shelter was always happier to accept you if you had something for them, and not all the busses were ride free. He was waiting for one more, before calling it a night.
The boy would be an easy mark. There was a bridge and water he could drop the body parts into as they were cut off the boy. The river ran fast and should take very little time to spread many parts over a wide area, and the size of the pieces would make it easier for the inhabitants of the river to consume.
Later, rinsing the blood off his hands, he reflected calmly upon what he had already learned. A razor blade, while sharp and intimate, can be hard to hold when there’s that much blood, and the larger joints make it hard to cut accurately. He had removed all four appendages to the knees and elbows before the boy bled out but had realized during the second arm there was no reason not to start with fingers, or indeed as small as individual knuckles to prolong enjoyment. Stupidly, he had not considered the amount of noise until the first hand was off, but the in a stroke of genius, he stuffed the hand in the boy’s mouth and taped it shut so he was effectively gagging himself. He had to laugh at the terror on the boy’s face, and the revulsion when he realized what was in his mouth.
Additionally, he regretted doing it out in public. Only minutes after he had dropped the last part into the water and scuffed up the dirt to cover the bloodstains, a couple walked past less than three feet away. He feigned smoking a cigarette and they both gave him a curt nod, their hands and minds clearly focused elsewhere, but he could see the girl wrinkle her nose. Silly mistake. He had been lucky, plain and simple. But there had been no plan, no purpose. An hour ago he never would have believed himself capable of waving a boy’s body parts before his dying eyes. But he couldn’t stop now. He had learned so much. There was so much left to do.

So much left to do.
My eyes jerked open. I was still sitting, still alone. My reaction had been far less violent this time, but it had not been nearly such a shock to descend into my past. I was shaking, and my palms were sweaty. The Corpse Flower reeked, the scent of death permeating my nostrils. Rather than sending me into another flashback, which I desperately craved, it enhanced the memories I had already been treated to view, providing me with more details. There was a light drizzle the night I had killed the boy. The boy had a rotten tooth. I remember noticing after he had expired and wishing I had relieved him of it earlier, before gagging him. The KFC girl I had shared the bed with a filthy corpse, long dead and in the advanced stages of decomposition. Why I had left it there for so long was beyond me.
I needed fresh air, to process my thoughts, and didn’t want to risk falling into the past again. I had been there for a while, and a guard was looking at me strangely every so often. The sensation of his eyes boring into me was physically distasteful. I had to get out of there.
The exit to the parking lot seemed a long way off and yet the journey was blurred. Faces and deeds swam past me as waves of unearthed emotion gasped for breath and greedily sucked down air, growing stronger. More than anything else now, I remembered the feeling, the sensation I got deep inside when I knew I had found the next one. The explosion of creativity which consumed me as I carefully planned the next tableau. A wave of all-consuming anticipation would crash over me and I would be possessed with a deep seated need which could only be satisfied by one thing. At least, I assumed so, as I could not recall having ever sought a substitute, nor felt the need to try, neither from a pragmatic nor moral viewpoint.
I reached my car after an eternity and smoked furiously, unaware of the irony of my exiting the arboretum for fresh air. I was wrestling with a mad urge. A stupid urge. A dangerous urge. I knew it. But I guess this is how addicts feel right before a relapse. Until you’ve felt something like that, you can’t understand. The driving want that becomes a need. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

“You did it once, so you can do it again, right?” The detective’s voice carried more than a hint of smug and self-satisfaction which seemed to echo in the small metal room.
The person sitting across the table from him looked back at him for a second, impassive, before smiling. “Something like that.”
“Apparently not as well as you used to, though, because you’re sitting there now.”
“Yes,“ Steve agreed. “And isn’t it very lucky for you, officer? I started again before I remembered all of my notes on police investigations and procedures. If I had not, all those families I changed would never be able to look at you as competent ever again, would they, and you would have died with me on your mind, though you would have never known who I was.” Steve grinned. “Funny how I am your salvation. Even in your world, I am God. I am your savior.”
The detective slammed the door shut on his way outside, purple-faced, his teeth grinding. Steve looked at the floor, where his still bloody shoes scuffed red, at the filth beneath his nails. Raising them to his face, he breathed in deeply, catching a last tantalizing scent of the Corpse Flower.