Hide and Seek

9:15 A.M., Friday, July 7, 2017

PLUR-MAkKikM, just outside Honolulu, HI

Paul Macon, eleven years old, tilted his head upward and sniffed the warm Hawaiian breeze. There was the scent of flowers in the air, and the scent of trees, and moist earth. Here in the woods this was hardly unexpected, but Paul was searching for another aroma, one he thought he had detected a moment ago.

There it was! Unmistakable, it was the scent of the citrus perfume his girlfriend, Paula Akron, had doused herself with as the first action in this game of advanced hide and seek. The children had been reading The Beasts of Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and they had become fascinated with the idea of tracking by smell. Now, Paul and Paula had not been raised by apes, and they knew it, but perhaps they could do what Tarzan did if the smell were stronger. The proper test, of course, would be for one of them to become smelly and hide in the jungle, and for the other to attempt to find the smelly lover. A game of rock, paper, scissors had determined that Paula would hide and Paul would seek. Tomorrow, the roles would be reversed.

Paul quickly discovered that smell wasn’t nearly as directional as hearing, and couldn’t even compare with sight. But, he knew from the books that smell traveled with the wind, so if he moved in the direction the light breeze was coming from, he was more likely to find his girlfriend.

What he found was her clothing lying in a small heap on the ground. The aroma of citrus was strong, but Paul knew that she had applied the perfume to her skin, and should still be smelly. She hadn’t removed her clothes to hide better, she had stripped them off because she liked being nude. The young lovers wouldn’t have bothered putting clothes on in the first place if they hadn’t been expecting their friends Annette, Billy, Kalena, and Neil to join them. But these four had backed out and, already dressed, the child-couple had proceeded into the woods alone.

The boy smiled; all proper jungle warriors were naked, or almost so. His clothing soon joined hers and, like Adam, he proceeded naked and not ashamed to the nearest tree, into the branches of which he looked. His girlfriend was not there. He leaned against the rough bark to think.

Paul’s nose twitched. He was upwind of the clothes and so could not smell them, but the perfume smell was back. He stepped away from the tree and sniffed, but it was gone. What the hell? Returning to the tree, he smelled perfume again. Before long he discovered that there were two spots on the trunk where the perfume had apparently rubbed off of Paula. She must have brushed or leaned against this same tree. Paul began sniffing every tree in the vicinity. This was time consuming, but it gradually led him deeper into the woods.

At one point the scent-clue was so faint the little boy wasn’t sure it was really there, and as he moved his face almost in contact with the bark, he found a long, reddish-brown hair. Paul smiled; perfume wasn’t the only clue a jungle tracker had at his disposal. He realized that he was actually moving towards the spot he and Paula had called home after running away, before Ted Michaels had found them. Would the little girl hide there? The little hut they had built was probably gone; it had been two years and there was wind and rain to destroy what they had once taken such pride in having created.

Maybe Paula would hide there, and Paul almost abandoned the trail in favor of heading directly to the spot he hadn’t seen in two years. But no, better to follow the clues. After all, the point of this game was tracking, not guessing.

Paul found another hair, this time on the ground attached to a stick, and soon he saw what might be a human footprint. It wasn’t a nice defined thing but rather a lopsided depression in the dirt, covered with leaves and a broken stick. The child bent down and sniffed the possible spoor; perfume. Not strong, but definitely there. He could half tell, half guess the direction the print was pointing, and in that direction he walked, pausing from time to time in order to test the air.

A shift in the direction of the breeze brought the faint but unmistakable fragrance of citrus to the boy’s seeking nostrils. He hadn’t been able to smell the clothes on the breeze until he was very close; Paula must be nearby.

And indeed she was. The eleven year old girl was standing, in naked silence, in front of the hut she and Paul had lived in two years ago. It was still there, but only because it was enclosed in a box of transparent plastic. The girl was staring at it and hardly noticed her boyfriend’s approach.

“Found you,” Paul called out as he walked to stand beside her.

Paula threw her arms around her lover and hugged him tightly.

“Look at this,” she told him, and pointed to a plaque on the front of the plastic box. Paul read the caption out loud.

“Here, in this hut they built with their own hands, Paula Akron and Paul Macon lived together alone, without adult assistance or interference, from June 22^nd to July 13^th, 2015. Already, at the tender age of nine years, their love was overcoming all obstacles. We in the adult world could learn much from them.”

Paula had tears in her eyes, and Paul noticed there was at least one in his own. The girl spoke first.

“He saved our hut. He covered it in plastic so it wouldn’t get destroyed by the rain and stuff.”

“He put up a sign,” the boy added, “so that even in a hundred years people will know what it is.”

They spent a little time reminiscing, a bit amazed with their younger selves for running away from everything and setting up in the woods, intending to live there until they turned eighteen. They walked around a bit, pointing out the trees from which they had gathered fruit, the stream from which they had drunk and in which they had bathed, and the different spots in which they had discussed quantum physics.

Before long they were discussing quantum physics again, though Paul quickly learned not to determine both the position and the momentum of a particle where perfume lurked. Within half an hour the little boy smelled almost as strongly of citrus as Paula did.

They noted differences: Paula now had breasts, if barely. Paul could now experience Heisenberg uncertainty, even expounding deep inside the subject. Well, deeper than he could go when he was nine, when he couldn’t contribute wave functions at all.

Afterward they lay together, hand in hand, and Paul told Paula all about how he had tracked her down. The little girl paid close attention, because she wanted to do as well the next day.

After another few minutes of talk and many more of discussing quantum physics (eleven-year-olds recover quickly) they headed back for the house. They picked up their clothes along the way, and decided that wearing them was more convenient than carrying them.

Paula walked into the house first, Paul stepping in just behind her.

“Hey kids,” Ted Michaels greeted them.

The legal guardian hugged them both, but then he wrinkled his nose.

“You smell like an orange grove blew up on you,” the man informed them.