A shop in a shopping mall, called Cinnabon. I did not walk to it. I was pulled, by the nose, across two floors, the way a fish is pulled by a line it cannot see. I came to the mall for socks. I want to be clear about that, because it is the last clear thing about that afternoon. The smell reached me on the second floor, by the men's clothing. Cinnamon. Sugar. Butter, browning. I turned toward it the way a sunflower turns, without deciding to. I went down the escalator. I crossed the atrium. I arrived at a counter where a young man stood beside a glass case of white spiral pastries the size of my fist, each one buried under frosting laid on without mercy. "You smelled it, huh," he said. He knew. He has watched men arrive like this all day. Dazed. Sockless. Drawn in on the line he casts with an oven. In my country, this would be a forbidden art. To defeat a man not with a blade, but with a smell that walks him out of his own fortress and delivers him, unarmed, to your gate. We outlawed it. It was considered beneath a warrior. Here, they put it on a sign and gave the young man an apron. "I came in for socks," I told him. "They all did," he said, and boxed me a roll I had not yet ordered, because he already knew. I ate it standing at the counter. It was warm, and it was vast, and it defeated me completely. I did not buy socks that day. Or the next time. There is a Cinnabon between me and the sock store, and a man cannot pass through a smell like that and come out the other side still thinking about socks. It has been two months. My wife buys the socks now. She has stopped asking why I cannot. She knows there is a mall, and a smell, and a young man with an oven, and that her husband, who once fought with steel, surrenders every Saturday to a pastry he can smell from the parking lot. I came in for socks. I have never once left with socks. I regret nothing, which is the most defeated thing a man can say.