Free The Breezes by Joseph O'Neill

pedals and swaying from side to side as he climbs into the gale. The windows shudder again, clattering violently this time, as though rocked by a tremor.
    Well, at least that’s one thing I can rest assured about: quakes. No movement of the earth’s crust has ever been recorded in Rockport and that, according to Steve, is a fact. I’m happy to believe him. Thanks to his newfound enthusiasm for the Time-Life pamphlets about natural disasters, Steve actually knows something about planetary spasms. It’s not the first time he has mastered a peculiar field of expertise. He used to be an authority on new consumer goods, the novelty products advertised in the morning junk mail that puddled in the hallway door every morning. Steve used to peruse those catalogues for hours, lost in a world of doggy boot-scrapers, portable intercom door-chimes, sonic mole-chasers, therapeutic putty and extra-loud personal alarms, dreaming, perhaps, of – well, who knows what he was dreaming of? Now, though, the innovation reports have been supplanted in his imagination by the Time-Life pamphlets offering books about the inimical forces of nature. Although Steve has never bought a page of the menacing literature on offer, he enjoys reading about reading it. There is one particular leaflet, called ‘Storm (Discover the Deadly Forces That Shape Our World)’, which he consults time after time.
    â€˜God, just listen to this,’ he said one time. ‘This is just amazing. Just listen to this.’ He started to recite the text in a painstaking monotone. ‘‘Man lives at the bottom of a dense and turbulent sea of gases. Ten miles deep, the atmosphere is constantly in motion; and when one mass collides with another, the skies erupt, scouring the earth and purging the atmospherewith unbridled fury. The result,”’ Steve quoted, ‘‘is storm …”’
    At this point I left the room to make myself a coffee, but there was to be no escape. Steve raised his voice for my benefit, so that even from the kitchen I continued to hear his intonings.
    â€˜â€˜In 1938 a hurricane veered away from its expected path and cut into the East Coast of America. At a windspeed of 120 mph it cut a swathe between New York and Boston leaving over 600 dead, 60,000 homeless and caused damage estimated (1938 values) at over a third of a billion dollars.”’ Steve paused to assimilate these statistics. ‘‘On December 8 1963, a bolt of lightning struck a 707 jet sending it plummeting to the ground in a ball of flame. Eighty-two people died.” God,’ Steve said. ‘‘These natural catastrophes are evidence of the deadly power of man’s oldest enemy, and demonstrates that with all our advanced technology, our satellites and computers, we are always at the mercy of mighty, ever-threatening forces.”’ Steve put down the leaflet. ‘God,’ he said again in a dazed voice.
    It is possible that this apocalyptic material provides a clue to why Steve is so indisposed to leave the flat. Perhaps he regards Rockport – a wholesome, unperilous city in the general view – as an environment of native wantonness. Maybe this is why he adheres so devoutly to the inside world: because he has seen through Rockport, that comfortable haven, seen through its façade of well-being, its superficies of bottlebanks and grass-anchored dunes, of cycling lanes, malls, shipyards and open-air skating-rinks, of pike-stocked canals and theatres, of all-ticket football matches, academic symposia, stinking fish-markets, parks sprinkled with deck-chairs and bars pouring out pint after black pint of thick stout. Maybe Steve has identified all of these as mere phenomena and maybe, in accordance with some privately held epistemology, he has discovered that things are not as ordered and purposeful as they might seem; that Rockport, like the boiling Venus of his pamphlets, is in essence a place of