Catechism

The sound of the idling cars just outside his basement apartment windows kept him awake at night, as did the exhaust fumes, which seeped into the building and made it, on the worst nights, all but impossible to breathe. By midwinter, everything in the city, indoors and out, smelled of exhaust. A pall of blue-grey haze, such as he had once seen in Los Angeles, hung above the city.

Among the things with which the residents of the city diverted themselves throughout the long winters was a car called “Old Faithful,” which was placed on the frozen lake near the university each January and left there until, with the melting of the ice in the spring or during an unexpected but not unheard-of winter thaw, it sank out of sight.

To raise money for some charity, people placed bets on when Old Faithful would sink through the ice.

For ten dollars he bought an entry form and guessed that Old Faithful would sink on March 17. On March 17 of that year, it was thirty-eight degrees below zero and the lake looked as if one could safely have driven across it a fleet of tractor-trailers.

Old Faithful sank not quite two months later, on May 11. It was not left at the bottom of the lake but was dragged from the lake by the chains, which, in January, had been fastened to its undercarriage. In this way, the number of cars in the lake did not increase by one each spring and it was possible to use Old Faithful over and over again.

What were the city’s most remarkable natural features? An ash-coloured river, from which bubbles of sulphur erupted continuously, that wound its way through the neighbourhoods near the university and from which there came a stench that carried throughout the city—just such a stench as his high-school chemistry teacher had described as being like that of “last year’s cabbage.”

When hell freezes over it will look like that, he thought.

There was a kind of mud called “gumbo” that was so deep and volatile that it rendered pointless the laying of sidewalks in the outlying parts of the city, the parts where, not long after his arrival, he went for a walk and wound up with boots so encrusted that when he stood on the pavement to wipe them clean he found himself six inches taller than usual and his feet so gumbo-laden that he lurched along like Frankenstein’s monster.

There was cold of a severity for which not even a childhood spent in Newfoundland was sufficient preparation. He was terrified by the early onset of this cold, by whose innocuousness the locals swore and attributed to its being “dry” and, which, by October, made it necessary for him to buy replacements for his winter clothes. He was terrified, too, by the wind chill, which was measured in “watts” and which, when it surpassed 2,000 watts, was, in spite of its “dryness,” thought to be sufficient reason for warning people not to venture out of doors for more than thirty seconds at a time.

Did the users of the library frequently consult with him in his capacity as writer-in-residence?