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hard to tell what was there, it was so indefinite, at one moment leading me to think it was here inside the room, the next convincing me that it was only the memory of a smell, a memory that some obscure chain of associations had set off as a result of my writing.
    There was a third possibility, though it took several minutes for it to dawn on me: that the smell was coming from me, from my own body.
    This was a shock. I straightened up and tried to smell myself. Nothing. I staggered upright, clutching the end of the bed, and opened my shirt and trousers, fumbling clumsily at the buttons in my haste. Was it there? Again that awful uncertainty—I would seem to have it, then it was gone. I sat hunched on the bed, clutching myself round the shins, my forehead on my knees. Did I have it? Was there gas? Was it seeping from my groin? I lifted my head and turned it helplessly from side to side. Gas from my groin? It was at that moment that I became aware of a noise in the attic overhead, quiet laughter followed by a sort of bump—then there was silence again.
    I had little sleep the rest of that night, and the light stayed on. I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind, but it wouldn’t go away, a terrible nagging uncertainty persisted.
    I was particularly uneasy at breakfast, for I had the feeling that they could destroy me, any of them, with just a glance; I felt like a light bulb. It wasn’t until I reached the canal that some semblance of normality returned, and as with trembling fingers I rolled a cigarette, and the minutes slipped by me in that lonely place, so did the events of the night come to seem like a waking nightmare of some kind; after a while I was able to shrug it off.
    But gas—why gas? I was at a loss to know what to make of it. Was it connected to the gasworks on the far side of the canal? They don’t have gasworks in Canada, so when I’d looked at the three great domes behind the factory it was the first sight I’d had of such things in two decades, though it’s the structural character that disturbs me, nothing more, the uprights comprise thousands of steel modules, and each of the four faces of each module is a frame with diagonal crossstruts; and stacked as they are to a great height, they repeat this crisscross pattern almost to infinity, and if I look at them too long I become absorbed in the pattern and the effect is horribly vertiginous—this is foolish, I know, but the sensation is real nonetheless. Is this why I suffered those bizarre sensations last night? I failed to find a connection.

    I walked home slowly through the wet empty streets. It had begun to rain earlier in the afternoon (I had not gone back to the house for lunch), and the drizzle had persisted for several hours now. I was soaked through, but I didn’t care, it felt cleansing, and after the peculiarly unwholesome events of the night I welcomed this. On I went as the damp day thickened to dusk, past a long series of grimy brick arches, a smoke-blackened viaduct supporting the railway lines that slice across the East End streets, many of the arches bricked up now, or sealed off with sheets of corrugated tin behind which scrapyards and garages did their furtive business. From one of them a humped man in a shabby wheelchair suddenly emerged then went lurching round the corner, and I followed him under the arch, and coming out on the other side I saw, again, to the east, the gasworks, the rusty bulk of its trio of domes stained and streaked a dark reddish-brown in the drizzle.
    I crept back into the house and went straight up to my room, where I intended to smoke, for I had smoked very little all day. I stood by my table as I groped for tobacco and papers, and gazed out of the window at the shabby square below, in the center of which stands a little park with spiked iron railings, a few bushes, a tree or two, a small pond, and some grass where the children play. It was almost dark. At the gate of the park, padlocked since 5:30