Читать книгу Areas of Fog - Will Dowd - Страница 11

LONDON TOWN

NOTHING WAS HAPPENING this week, weather-wise. Monday was mild—a fugitive March day hiding out in mid-January—while Tuesday left so little impression on my mind that I could not swear in a court of law the day actually transpired.

Then the fog rolled in.

It happened on Wednesday night, when no one was looking. Dusk fell, the mercury dropped, and suddenly the whole east coast of Massachusetts was saturated in abject eeriness.

I walked outside and found reality suspended, the everyday world dissolved in a cataract gloom.

Somewhere ahead of me in the white murk, I heard the hollow sound of a glass bottle rolling on its side. It came to a jangling stop against a curb, then began rolling again, back the way it had come.

All considered, the fog gave me the haunting sense that strange things were about to happen. I felt like a character on the first page of a novel.

I wasn’t alone.

“I feel like we’re in Sherlock Holmes,” my grandmother remarked when I saw her on Thursday. She was right, of course. It was fine weather for fishing a body from the Thames or swinging your cane at a street urchin.

If anyone recognized the literary merits of fog, it was the Victorian authors, who practically mass-produced the stuff. It was their way of dropping a veil on their hyper-rational, industrialized metropolis.

In one Sherlock Holmes story, the bored detective condemns London criminals for not taking advantage of a weeklong fog. “The thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle,” Holmes says. “It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.”

Interestingly, at least to an English major, fog always seems to gather on the first page of these stories.

It pours through Scrooge’s keyhole at the start of A Christmas Carol, swirls with metaphoric import at the beginning of Bleak House, and even appears in its cousin form—marshmist—to blind Pip at the dawn of Great Expectations.

And that’s just Dickens.

Fog belongs on the first page of novels. That’s how literature comes to us. It emerges from the ghostly haze of the blank page, and if you take just a few steps into it, you lose sight of who you were and where you came from.

Take Sherlock’s advice to Watson: bring a revolver.