The Person Falling Here Is Me?

I have been REALLY good to go to the library these past two weeks.  I ought to give Big Anklevich the credit or blame, since he just keeps writing and publishing and, I dunno, swinging from the monkey bars at the school playground without being afraid to look down.

Today, I was sitting at one of their little cubicles, typing away (or dorking around with A.I., or answering inane questions for eBay*, or reading about James Clavell's time in a Japanese POW camp, etc.), when I caught a whiff of something considerably foul.  It was the smell your clothes can get if you soil them, then forget to throw them in the wash (you know what I mean by "soil").  I've met homeless people before that smell like that, but I feel bad saying so.

Anyway, there are often lots of homeless folks here at the library, since they can come in out of the cold or rain (or sunshine, I guess) and sit around until the place closes, and hey, I take advantage of this place myself, so I'm totally not judging), but I looked about me and didn't see any around.  In fact, I didn't see any other people around.  So what was making that smell?

I couldn't tell, but I stood up and looked around the cubicle, looked down on the floor, and there was nothing.  Nobody else was sitting nearby, and I didn't see anyone walk past, trailing a stench behind them.  

It occurred to me that . . . jeez, what if it's me?  I've smelled bad a time or many, so I put away my laptop and went straight to the bathroom, just in case.  In the stall, I smelled my shirt, I smelled my shoe, and I did that thing where you scoop at the air around your butt to draw the bad smell up into your nostrils.  I checked my shorts too, you know why.  But nothing.  

Was it me?  If so, why hadn't the smell followed me into the toilet stall?

I went back to my desk, puzzled.  I figured it might be the area I'd been sitting in.  Someone may have, you know, stained the floor there below the cubicle, and it wouldn't hurt to sit someplace else.  So I did.

I started typing again (or more likely, surfing the internet, stupidly spending my very last moments of youth, like I was a teenager sleeping until one in the afternoon), and before too long . . . I smelled it again.  It wasn't as bad this time, but it was definitely there.  Nobody was around this cubicle either, and I really did suspect that it was me: For some reason, I smelled like a corpse that was found at the bottom of an outhouse.

It upset me quite a bit.  I'm not a vain man, quite the opposite, but except for my "buddy" Mark, nobody had ever told me I stunk before.  At least not since I was a kid.

I didn't wait for the library to close, but went straight home, meaning to shower away the funk, but when I did, the smell was totally absent, not even on my socks.  I sniffed the seat of my car too, and there was nothing.

So, who or what was it?  I've mentioned before that the library has a reputation for being haunted (one of the librarians approached me as it was closing--I HAVE to have blogged about this--and told me, "Oh, it's totally haunted."), so I suppose . . .  Nah, come on.

*"When you say that it's new, do you mean it's unused, or you took it out of the package and then put it back in when you decided to sell it?"