When the winds blew from the east,
he smelled the fish stalls on Spadina, salty and redolent of Chinese
barbecue spices. When it blew from the north, he smelled baking bread in
the kosher bakeries and sometimes a rare whiff of roasting garlic from
the pizzas in the steaming ovens at Massimo's all the way up on
College. The western winds smelled of hospital incinerator, acrid and
smoky.
His father, the mountain, had attuned Art to smells, since they were the
leading indicators of his moods, sulfurous belches from deep in the
caverns when he was displeased, the cold non-smell of spring water when
he was thoughtful, the new-mown hay smell from his slopes when he was
happy. Understanding smells was something that you did, when the
mountain was your father.
Once the bookcases were seated and screwed into the walls, out came the
books, thousands of them, tens of thousands of them.
Little kids' books with loose signatures, ancient first-edition
hardcovers, outsized novelty art books, mass-market paperbacks,
reference books as thick as cinderblocks. They were mostly used when
he'd gotten them, and that was what he loved most about them: They
smelled like other people and their pages contained hints of their
lives: marginalia and pawn tickets, bus transfers gone yellow with age
and smears of long-ago meals. When he read them, he was in three places:
his living room, the authors' heads, and the world of their previous
owners.
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